Biochar Experiment 1 1/9/10

Al made an Everything Nice pyrolyzer from the design on the World Stove website. We used a large coffee can and then a canister for the two cans so it was rather large. We first tried pine cones but they just smoked so we put in pellets instead. This gave a good clean burn and we put a tripod over the stove and boiled water, heated soup, cooked pasta and cooked pasta sauce with fresh meat and fresh vegetables. When the flame extinguished, there was still some smoke coming from the stove so it was covered on the top to remove oxygen and set in a shallow basin of water on the bottom. This extinguished the smoke but moistened the bottom of the char slightly. When we emptied the stove, we saw that some of the pellets had not pyrolyzed. We believe this was because of the fairly large diameter of the can. To dry the char and pyrolyze the remaining pellets, we put the mass into a canister and put it into our hot wood stove. This allowed complete pyrolysis of the remaining pellets and provided complete drying of the fuel. It